I bought a Toshiba 500 GB usb 3.0 hard drive last week and instantly ran home to see how fast I could push it. On my desktop (that I built) I was able to get 200 MB/sec. On my laptop (MSI FX something or other), which I dual boot Windows 7/Ubuntu 11.10, I was able to get about 120 MB/sec on Windows, but on Ubuntu, i get about 25 MB/sec.

you would expect slower speeds if you are accessing a FAT32/NTFS external partition. What are you using? Have you tested against a ext4 partitioned external drive?
–
fossfreedom♦Mar 5 '12 at 23:11

1

@fossfreedom - It would be good to put your comment as an answer since it not a common thing to know that. It will help more users when they come with the same problem and see this info.
–
Luis Alvarado♦Mar 6 '12 at 15:42

2 Answers
2

When accessing an external USB hard drive formatted in FAT/NTFS, even though it's V3.0 compliant, transfer speed might be slower than what's expected. I tested with a Western Digital 500GB v3.0. If you're the only one using this e-HDD, format it to EXT4, that's way better and transfer speed should increase.

To benchmark Read/Write rates for your e-HDD, you can use the Disk Utility (Install it, from Software center). You can run it then, from Terminal using the command: palimpsest

Beware that the Write Benchmark tests require your e-HDD to be empty.

Nota Bene: Use the same files if you benchmark speed between MS Windows and Ubuntu. And use a reliable tool in Ms Windows to get accurate transfer speed information (I wouldn't even use the utility provided by the e-HDD vendor). DOn't rely on the info displayed on the transfer dialog when copying files to or from your e-HDD, they're usually incorrect.
And, 705Mb/s is a big marketing Lie.